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Archive for October, 2005

Wednesday, October 19th, 2005

AGITATING FOR A HERMETICALLY SEALED “DEMOCRACY”

Marc Schulman of The American Future gives a good fisking to the pro-democracy but anti-globalization openDemocracy editors Anthony Barnett and Isabel Hilton:

“This is where their analysis falls short. Granted, departures from democratic practices aren’t helpful to the anti-terrorist cause. But Barnett and Hilton fail to mention the helpful effects of bringing democratic practices — e.g., the referendum on the Iraq constitution — to people who have never before experienced them. The presumptively negative effects of the former must be weighed against the decidely positive effects of the latter. This the authors do not do.”

I have to add that there is a definite incongruity between advocating political freedom to make choices in terms of one’s government while wanting to preclude or restrict the economic freedom to make choices in every other area of one’s life – work, lifestyle, access to information, travel, religion and culture. Denying people the latter ultimately makes a mockery of the former; a farmer chained in perpetuity behind his water buffalo by the state casts a ballot only to decide which hand is going to hold the whip over his head.

” In the general course of human nature, A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will. “

– Alexander Hamilton

Wednesday, October 19th, 2005

THE STATE DEPARTMENT DINOSAUR IN A CENOZOIC AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

Collounsbury called my attention to this article by The Washington Post on how the State Department has institutionalized incentives that mitigate against Foreign Service Officers developing real in-country Arabist expertise ( if any FSO’s become experts that is in spite of, not because of, official procedures). An excerpt, first the short version of the problem at State:

” This is barrier number three: Foreign Service officers see few incentives to advance to high levels of Arabic language competence. There is no financial or career reward for qualifying at the higher levels. Moreover, to the extent that the time involved in language study detracts from diplomatic job responsibilities, the commitment to achieve near-fluency could even be a career-stopper.”

Now the lengthy excerpt that reveals the bureaucratic mind at its finest:

“To understand why requires a safari into the bureaucratic undergrowth, so grab your machete. The Foreign Service classifies language ability into five levels, with “1” being the lowest (able to handle only the very simplest social situations) and “5” the highest (a level rarely assigned to anyone but a native speaker).

From a public diplomacy standpoint, the key distinction is between a “3” and a “4.” We have a fairly good supply of 3’s in Arabic, almost 200 as of August 2004 (the latest State Department data available). A level 3 can handle one-on-one situations, or something like a ministry meeting in a subject area they know well. But a level 3 speaker would flounder in a complex situation. If you put a 3 in a public meeting where many excited people are speaking on top of one another, for example, or in a coffee shop conversation with college students arguing about religion and the state, he or she would be lost. Double the difficulty if the diplomat has been trained only in Modern Standard Arabic, a formal dialect very different from the colloquial dialects that people actually speak (see sidebar). But these are precisely the kinds of situations that our Middle East diplomats must be equipped to handle.

Speaking, moreover, is generally harder than listening. No responsible person would ask a 3 to speak before an unfriendly crowd at the local university (or at the embassy gates), much less put a 3 in front of a television camera and expect a clear, engaging and cogent discussion of U.S. Middle East policy in Arabic. For that you need a 4, and preferably a 4+ or a 5. So how many of these 4 and 5 level speakers do we have in Arabic? As of August 2004 — 27. At the highest levels (4+ and 5), we have a grand total of eight individuals worldwide.

This little band cannot possibly cover our need to understand and be understood across 21 embassies and consulates in a region with a population approaching 300 million people, and one, moreover, with very different dialects from east to west. Given that some of our Arabic speakers are inevitably on rotation in Washington or even assigned outside the region, our 27 most fluent Arabic-speaking diplomats equate to barely one per post.

…So how about option No. 2, turning more 3’s into 4’s? The State Department has a world-famous language training program, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), staffed by highly trained professionals. Anyone who has reached a 3 in Arabic can get to a 4 with determined study. Even a 2 has a good base to build on.

Unfortunately, current policies for language training make it all but impossible to turn 3’s into 4’s. Upgrading our roster of Arabic speakers would require getting around three obstacles.

First, traditional language training, based on sending officers to full-time language study for extended periods, is expensive. Since Arabic is a difficult language, the FSI figures it takes two years of full-time training to get a committed learner from a simple greeting of ” Salaam aleikum” to level 3.

The State Department has made a significant commitment to expanding language training, nonetheless. Enrollments in Arabic and other challenging regional languages such as Farsi and Uzbek increased more than 80 percent from 2003 to 2004, from 228 officers to 415. Training averaged only a couple of months per person, though — pretty basic stuff delivered in a hurry for most of the participants, in other words.

But there’s a second stopper. FSI is not really sure how much training it would take to get from a 3 to a 4 in any case, because FSI stops training at 3.

Training goes only to officers assigned to “language-designated” positions — slots that have been officially determined to require language skills. Thus, a diplomat assigned to Washington cannot get advanced Arabic training until he or she is actually assigned to a language-designated job overseas. And then there’s no time to build real competency. This set-up creates a strong disincentive to designate positions as requiring language skills. No embassy wants to restrict its search to the comparatively few officers already qualified in Arabic or, even worse, effectively give up the position for the two years required to train an officer to a level 3 — and carry them on its budget the whole time they sit in language classes.

So no posts are designated above level 3, which means, naturally, that the Foreign Service does not offer training beyond the 3, either. If 3’s want additional language training to improve their skills to a 4, they have to do it on their own time and their own nickel. (The Foreign Service Institute has a pilot “Beyond 3″ program, but it had a mere two people in it as of the latest report.)”

Eight highly qualified Arabists. Jesus Christ ! If that is the state of FSO Arabic fluency with 22 countries using Arabic as their lingua franca how many Urdu, Pashto and Farsi speakers do we have ? Two ? No wonder we can’t penetrate the Iraqi insurgency or sell our foreign policy – our diplomatic corps barely has the linguistic wherewithal to stop at a gas station in Petra and ask for directions.

In case you believe that the article may be overstating things, here’s another view from a retired USG Arabist and analyst who participates on the Small Wars Council discussion board:

“Most outsiders have a very distorted view of how State selects, trains, and assigns personnel to the embassies. As a youngster FAO relatively fresh from DLI Arabic, I went to Sudan as a FAO traiinee. I had zero Sudanese Arabic training and had done a year in Turkey and 6 months in French training before arriving in Khartoum. That said, I found aside from certain individuals like the Ambassador, my Arabic was better than most. The Defense Attache who had gone to State langauage school and claimed a higher pro score than me was basically a “helllo, good morning, goodbye” level speaker. So this does not surprise me.

Even when the language skills are there, embassies are not necessarily keyed into what is really happening around them. Ambassadors set the tone. Too many embassies are viewed as plums because they offer the most pay (COLA, hardship, danger) and you get youngsters sent there to get their feet wet or the “old hands” who stay and stay so their retirement pay gets maxed. The youngsters don’t know how to operate and they mimic what happens among the “old hands. Other embassies get out and see what is happening beyond the “salle d’honneur” at the Foreign Ministry; they actually have a pulse on
events. “

Ouch.

Why then do things not change for the better? Yes, particularly after 9/11 but international incidents originating in the ME did not begin in 2001; we have decades of neglet here. Why ?

The explanation in my view is twofold: political and bureaucratic.

Politicians in the Executive Branch have zero incentive to invest political capital in reforming the State Department. The public isn’t interested in the minutia of Foggy Bottom and barely attends to the broadest outline of foreign policy, absent a presidential election or a military attack. If a President can get the key appointees confirmed, create a few new ” sexy” positions to deal with the crisis du jour and keep State from leaking to the press every five minutes that’s about as far as management priorities go for the average administration.

Politicians in the Legislative Branch also lack any positive incentives to reform State for the same reasons. Congressmen can also gain mileage with the local papers back home by beating up on State’s “wasteful” foreign aid and dragging ambassadors and deputy assistant secretaries into hearings that revolve around appeasing single-issue zealots. Thirdly, Congressional staffers and State’s mandarins have a cozy relationship that both use to their advantage to undermine presidential policies in foreign relations ( not just George W. Bush, any president of either party).

The bureaucratic explanation is even simpler. State’s highest level career officials, by and large, like the system as it is. They are its products and given human nature, the leaders of long-established institutions are seldom revolutionaries. Or even reformers. Experienced players know how to game the system to transfer from post to post in a career-enhancing way. Tying advancement to regional depth would keep some hyperactive hotshots out of the action or preclude some from getting ” easy”, low-risk, postings. Career trajectories would be at the mercy of world events and shifting national interest.

This is why the unipolar hyperpower of the globalized, information age, 21st century crafts and executes a foreign policy with a department that had its last complete overhaul in the age of the Model T.

Tuesday, October 18th, 2005

SMALL WARS BLOGGING

I’m getting a lot of enjoyment as well as finding interesting and insightful material over at The Small Wars Council Discussion Board sponsored by The Small Wars Journal. Many of the members are current or former military personnel or who like Major Adam Strickland or Myke Cole, write for publication. ( I’ve recommended articles from both gentlemen in the past – Strickland, as an aside, also had a vigorous Letter to the Editor in this month’s The Atlantic). The interest at SWC ranges from operational methods in combat to the intersection of intelligence, policy, culture, history and languages in what Dr. Barnett would call Sys Admin deployments.

Some of the members have blogs or websites as well. For your perusal:

Hans News and Politics

Pen & Sword

Professional Soldiers

The Word Unheard

Prarie Pundit

Check them out !

Tuesday, October 18th, 2005

THE OLIGARCHY STRIKES BACK

The internet and the blogosphere have been a tremendous boon to liberty, permitting real-time information flows across the globe, increasing transparency and empowering the average citizen to speak out or even acquire real influence on the public issues of the day. The effects have sat poorly among some members of the elite, particularly in government and at major MSM institutions who enjoyed a preponderant influence in shaping opinion and setting the bounds of public discourse. Even at times dispensing disinformation with impunity.

Some of these folks would like that power back. They range from foreign governments that oppress their own citizens to MSM airheads who cannot stand the fact-checking and mockery from the common herd. They want to raise the barriers to entry again to circumscribe who can be heard.

Bruce Kesler has an excellent round-up of these would-be Oligarchs of Information in the Augusta Free Press:

“Return to pre-Internet journalism?

Guest View

Bruce Kesler

The Augusta Free Press

There are foreign and domestic movements afoot that may return journalism to its pre-Internet closedness. One would move control of the Internet to that bastion of freedom – for petty despots, that is – at the United Nations. The other would give the U.S. government the power to, in effect, license journalists.

Whether you are on the political left or right, or more likely just a news consumer who wants fuller information than provided by the mass media of your newspaper or TV network, your right to hear freedom of speech is at risk.

If not for the Internet’s openness, you would probably not have heard about many criticisms of the government, its programs or leading political figures, or just have heard what certain media or political elites choose for you to hear. They may like that insulation from the light of truth. Would you?

It is only due to the Internet that opposing views may ever get heard – as in the Vietnam veterans’ rebellion against John Kerry’s false presentation of himself. It is only due to the Internet that the self-serving conduct by politicians gets unearthed, and they embarrassed, so quickly – as in the spending spree by the Republican Congress in the so-called Transportation Bill. It is only due to the Internet that the abuses of sanctimonious leading journalists gets exposed – as in Dan Rather’s attempt to affect the 2004 election with false Bush military-service documents, or the hysteric misreporting of the causes and effects of Hurricane Katrina’s impact.

If that’s the situation in the United States, imagine what the Internet has meant to the struggle for freedom among those in China or Iran or Cuba or the kleptocracies in Africa. It’s virtually the only way the oppressed have to get real news from outside, to break out of the solitary confinement imposed by their governments to become members of a global civilized society, to get out truth to their people, and to unleash the worst fear of their rulers – international opinion – and bring approbation on their depravities.

I wrote about one of the threats to the Internet, “U.S. versus E.U., China, Cuba, Iran on Internet Control”:

“Let’s hope John Bolton can scuttle this one. At the World Summit on the Information Society, the European Union has lined up with such stalwarts of smothering internet freedom as China, Cuba, Iran and several African states (in name only, these tribal kleptocracies) to carry to the U.N. their effort to take control of the Internet. … (According to) Internet authority Milton Mueller: ‘It’s not clear to me that governments know what to do about anything at this stage apart from get in the way of things that other people do.’ Like freedom of speech. This issue, this outrageous putsch attempt, deserves an uproar, heard around the world on the Internet.” www.democracy-project.com/archives/001913.html.

Another blogger goes into much depth, including this key economic point: “It is on the basis of that ‘full faith and confidence’ in the system (of hands-off, efficient administration of the Internet by U.S. agencies) that vast information flows, often transacted by companies worth many billions of dollars, can occur on a routine basis.” http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2005/10/battle-for-internet.html.

In another column, I wrote about the “Summit to Suppress Internet Freedom.” Quoted is another important point. “Surrendering the Internet might also increase America’s vulnerability to on-line security threats. It could be difficult to guard against cyber-terrorism or to pursue terrorists on-line. If the Internet were under the supervision of a body unsure of what terrorism is, but quite sure that it does not like the United States.” www.democracy-project.com/archives/001894.html.

European bureaucrats in the mold of France’s Chirac or now former-chancellor Schroeder fantasize that they can act out their faded glory by tearing down the U.S., regardless of its consequences on world order, security or prosperity, not to mention the stagnation of their own economies. The former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt (quoted at the above Belmont link), politely demurs: “It seems as if the European position has been hijacked by officials that have been driven by interests that should not be ours.” Indeed, the interests, which are associated with the world’s oppressors.

There are those in the United States who shamelessly profiteer at the expense of the oppressed. I wrote elsewhere that “Bubba Yahoos for yen, and doesn’t ‘feel your pain’ ” about former President Clinton’s huge fee to speak at the 2005 China Internet Summit celebrating Yahoo’s $1 billion investment there, but his failure to mention that Yahoo!, like Google, Cisco and Microsoft, have profited by aiding the Chinese rulers find, and imprison, Internet dissidents. www.democracy-project.com/archives/001848.html.

Human Rights Watch blisters such profiteering at the expense of suppressing freedom. “When companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google decide to put profits from their Chinese operations over the free exchange of information, they are helping to kill that dream.” www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HRW/d04f251c81860f30ccd515681ee41ab9.htm.

Closer to home, and just as much to be feared and condemned, is the move to, in effect, have the federal government license journalists and free speech.

Ryan Sager writes of the “Cybercrackdown” in The New York Post: “These folks, the ones who fought so hard for the McCain-Feingold law, believe that political speech on the Internet threatens the purged-of-money paradise they think they’ve created in the non-digital world – and they’re willing to squelch the speech of every blogger in the land in their quest to tame the cyber-Wild West.”

Sager continues: “The FEC (Federal Elections Commission) has ruled that big-media companies … enjoy what’s called a ‘press exemption’ from McCain-Feingold – allowing them to support or attack candidates without being prosecuted for making illegal corporate campaign contributions. But it has yet to grant any such protection to blogs and other Web sites not considered part of the traditional media. The ‘cleanies’ want to make sure they never get it. Thus, the country’s leading campaign-finance-reform groups … all recipients of millions of dollars from left-wing foundations – are lining up.” www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/53480.htm.

The blog of former FEC attorney, Allison Hayward, is invaluable to tracking the twists and turns of this battle for freedom of speech, another example of how blogs are essential to pierce the miasma of government. (www.skepticseye.com) Ms. Hayward led me to this editorial in the Washington Times about “Suffocating the First Amendment.”

The editorial quotes a leading blogger testifying before Congress: “Bloggers don’t have influence because they start with large chunks of capital – in fact, most if not all start out as relatively lonely voices with tiny audiences. By delivering credible, interesting and valuable content, their audience and influence grows over time.”

The editorial concludes: “In other words, blogging is an endeavor subject to the rules of the free market. Inside this unbridled exercise in free speech, the good rise to the top, while the hacks and frauds go ignored or quickly disappear … applying McCain-Feingold to the Internet, even if diluted to protect bloggers, would mean that only millionnaires … or those funded by them, could afford to start a blog. Everyone else, like those who pay nothing for a site at Blogger.com, would have to have some way of knowing if their blogging is violating the briar patch of campaign-finance laws which only lawyers know how to navigate.” http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20051011-092709-1577r.htm.

On another front, establishment Sen. Richard Lugar has introduced a bill to provide a federal shield to journalists from having to reveal their sources. Most states have similar laws. However, federal courts are able to compel testimony in high crimes and national security cases. U.S. courts have not abused this ability, and the rights of U.S. citizens to their elemental safety does trump that of journalists to unrestrained anonymity of sources in exceptional cases.

Sen. Lugar’s bill excludes bloggers from this federal shield, defining journalists as only those operating in the old ways of the mass media. Sen. Lugar admits “this is a special boon for reporters.” However, as industry tradepaper Editor & Publisher observes, “some journalists oppose the popular federal shield proposal … (because of) fear that giving Congress the power to define who is and isn’t a journalist could lead effectively to the licensing of journalists.” www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001263585.

Another blogger journalist, Roger Simon, points out that such as conservative Michael Barone and liberal David Corn publish in established magazines and also maintain widely read, influential blogs. Which of their reports are to be exempt? Simon asks, “Are they protected by the shield law when they are writing, say, for The Los Angeles Times, but not when they blog? Confusing, isn’t it?” www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2005/10/lugar_luddite.php.

The Internet news report at CNET raises some other complications in interpreting such legislated definitions. (http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-5892666.html) It is not possible for even the best of intentioned or best skilled government lawyer to accomplish other than enriching other lawyers at the cost of independent citizens.

The net result (pun intended) of these government attempts would place the freedom of speech of Internet bloggers outside the law, effectively outlawing bloggers and your right to know. Wouldn’t that make our politicians more comfortable in their gerrymandered districts? Wouldn’t that make other nations’ rulers more comfortable in their tyrannies? Undue restrictions on freedom of speech serves imperious rulers, not citizens or democracy.”

The admirable vigilance of Mr. Kesler is the price of liberty. We need to watch our Congressmen closely. Republican or Democrat, both kinds of elected officials are by definition insiders. Some of whom have forgotten where they came from and why they are there.

Monday, October 17th, 2005

REMINDING THE WORLD OF DAR FUR


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Today a number of blogs are calling attention to the ongoing suffering in Dar Fur which has already claimed approximately 70,000 lives at the hands of the Janjaweed militia, a force so rag-tag in its military capabilities that they make Mladic’s drunken Bosnian Serb paramilitaries look like Rommel’s panzer divisions. Some estimates of this crisis:

Freedom House

Human Rights Watch

Amnesty International

The BBC

Dar Fur Information Center

The U.S. State Department

USAID

UNHCR

Additionally, Eddie at Live from the FDNF is hosting a Spotlight on Dar Fur 2.

The atrocities in Sudan are not too large, too remote or too dangerous to be dealt with by the great powers. Indeed, the problem is that the suffering is perceived by statesmen as being marginal and tolerable compared to the costs of doing something.

Public pressure can change that.


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